I now had plenty of time to return to my summer pastime of researching these needles. London and Paris had proven fairly straightforward, but Glasgow and New York where a whole different kettle of fish.
New York barely existed at the time that Paris and London were being remodelled. Having been fought over by colonial empires, the land was finally ceded to the British by the Dutch. But even then it had a history of turmoil that suggested that revolution wasn"t far away. Throughout its history New York has been a centre for unrest and civil uprising, as much from the melting pot of cultures as the tensions between them. The only real attempt at modelling had been done between the World Wars. New York, or Manhattan, at least, was resolutely square and gridded. Central Park did not appear to
